A Heat Sink can be used to decrease the duration between Portal hacks. It’s used to cooldown a portal so it can be hacked again sooner. The Heat sink is one of the 5 new Ingress Portal Mods from the Ingress v1.28.1. The Heat sink and Multi-hack will create some great portal farming areas.

As of March 20, 2014, a new ability was added to the Heat Sink, thanks to IQTech Research. An article was written to break down the changes into greater detail, Next Generation of Heat Sinks. In short, addition of a heat sink to a portal will reset both the cooldown timer, as well as reset the burnout counter. Both of these resets only apply to the agent deploying the heat sink.

Use:

Depending on its type, each deployed Heat Sink is decreasing the time interval between 2 hacks. Here is the exact property on each type:

Common = +20% Portal Cooldown Decrease

Rare = +50% Portal Cooldown Decrease

Very rare = +70% Portal Cooldown Decrease

Example:

Portal without Heat Sink = Hack every 5 minutes

Portal with Rare Heat Sink = Hack every 2.5 minutes

Heat sink cooldown/burnout reset

Example 1:
I’ve hacked a portal 4 times and burned it out. Adding a Heat Sink resets that burnout counter to 0, allowing me to hack 4 more times, with a total of 8 hacks. Other Agents still only get their original 4 hacks with no burnout reset.

Example 2:
I’ve installed a Common Multi Hack and hacked a portal 8 times before burning out the portal. Adding a Heat Sink will reset that counter to 0, allowing me to hack 8 more times.

Example 3:
I’ve just hacked, and another hack attempt is telling me I have 300 seconds before I can hack again. Adding a Heat Sink will reset this cooldown to 0, allowing me to hack immediately.

Diminished returns when multiple Heat Sinks are deployed:

With every deployed Heat Sink you get less and less benefit from them. This is a way to discourage deployment of same mods on portal.

We figured out the Niantic math again, here is how it goes:

The cooldown wait period with no mods is 300 seconds. You can’t decrease the cooldown time to the negative, you would destroy the whole universe! Here is how you calculate the decrease:

Common Heat Sink = 20% decrease or 0.2

Rare Heat Sink = 50% decrease or 0.5

Very Rare Heat Sink = 70% decrease or 0.7

The diminished returns values are as follows:

First = x1 speed

Second = x0.5 speed

Third = x0.5 speed

Forth =x0.5 speed

Here is a new formula:

Cooldown decrease = 1-(1-HHS)*(1-HS/2)*(1-HS/2)*(1-HS/2)

HHs is most rare HS that you have deployed, all other HS have only half the effect

So maximum cooldown decrease is 91.76% and that is 24.72s seconds between 2 hacks!

And here is one Calculation for C HS + C HS + R HS + VR HS = 1-(1-0.2/2)*(1-0.2/2)*(1-0.5/2)*(1-0.7) = 81.77% and most of cooldown decrease is 70% from last deployed Very Rare HS.

So we would suggest one Very Rare or Rare Heat Sink per portal, and if needed use Common Heat Sinks for rest!

With these new numbers and confirmed research, there is no difference in the order of deployment, so the stats will be the same if you place a Common HS and then a Very Rare HS or a Very Rare HS and then a Common HS.